Online video is synonymous with viral cat videos and charity campaigns that seek to reach as many people as possible. At the opposite end of the spectrum, however, there are many types of videos that should not be shared by anyone except authorized viewers. For instance, employee training videos, internal company communications, or videos intended only for paying customers. At best, you may feel overexposed, at worst, your company’s intellectual property could be compromised or your paid content devalued. Here is our guide to leveraging the most powerful video security tools available to protect your content.

Limit Who Views Your Videos

Without the ability to restrict viewership, anyone with access to your video can capture your video with a screen recording application. Meaning, they can copy it even if they can’t download the video outright. This is an inconvenient truth about online video, and one which cannot be prevented.

Consequently, the best way to control your content is to make sure the only people who can view your videos are those with permission to do so. This can be done in several different ways, but the general idea is the same.

One of the best ways is to restrict access to the page on which your videos are embedded. Whether you are publishing your videos on a SharePoint site, behind a paywall, or any sort of login screen, if you leave your videos set to Private on SproutVideo, they will not show up anywhere exccept where they are embedded. Consequently, you can be relatively sure that only people to whom you have specifically granted access are able to watch your videos (to be totally sure, keep reading).

If you are publishing your videos on our platform or cannot protect the page on which your videos are embedded, you can achieve a similar level of security using login protection. This powerful video security feature allows you to restrict video access to specific individuals, define the number of times they can login, or the time for which their video access is valid, as well as whether or not they can download any videos. The terms of access can be configured for each video, and for each individual. Login protection is far more powerful than specifying a simple password for a video, since a password can be shared along with a link to the video, and is less traceable.

Keep Your Video On Your Site

When embedding a video on a webpage, it’s important to be mindful of the fact that the embed code used to publish your video on your site can be copied and pasted to another webpage, potentially without your permission.

Using domain whitelisting, you can ensure that your video embed codes will only work on domains or subdomains that you specify. This is an easy and straightforward way to protect your content, and ensure it will not travel beyond your website.

For additional security, signed embed codes achieve a similar outcome, but add additional layers of security for your videos. While they require a little more effort to set up, a signed embed code is only valid for a defined period of time, ensuring that it cannot be reused on another website.

Keep It In Network

Sometimes, it might not be possible to assign everyone who needs to access your videos a login so they can access your videos. This is particularly true for large companies with a lot of employees.

Although not practical in all situations, an elegant solution is to restrict access to your videos based on the IP Address of your viewers. When using allowed IP Addresses, only visitors to your video landing page from IP Addresses that you specify can view and play your videos. The IP Address is automatically detected, so the experience is seamless for the viewers.

Track Viewer Behavior

The key metrics that can help identify potential issues are the domains on which your videos are being played, and if possible, the email addresses of your viewers. At a minimum, visibility into the IP Address of your viewers could help since IP Addresses can usually be traced.

Video security is a fast-changing and highly complex issue because it is so situationally dependent. What works today might not work tomorrow, but the SproutVideo team is here to help you stay ahead of best practices and new challenges.

If you have any specific questions about keeping your videos secure, please let us know in the comments below!